Social Networking Posts - Page 13

Facebook's Like buttons have become a cultural icon for the internet age, and today the company released updates to the iconic button. The like button is not alone though, as the Share button has been updated as well, with both now appearing more flat in appearance.

Gone is the heavy gradient and overly rounded corners which gives the buttons a more refined and elegant look. Additionally, less emphasis has been placed on the iconic "thumbs up" icon which now only appears in 2 of the button models. The new buttons employ the Helvetica typeface which is actually quite pleasing to the eye. What do you think about the new buttons? Let me know in the comments.

Twitter's Initial Public Offering (IPO) is fast approaching and is scheduled to kick off this Thursday, November 7th, and the company could offer as many as 80.5 million shares. This morning the company announced that ahead of the IPO, it has raised the per share price to $23 to $25 per share.

If the company does offer 80.5 million shares instead of the 70.5 it initially filled for, it could raise more than $2 billion in just a few days. Twitter will finalize everything Wednesday night and trading will open Thursday morning. Let's hope that this IPO turns out better than Facebooks IPO last year, and investors begin seeing returns much faster than they did with Facebook.

This morning Facebook launched its all new app for Windows 8.1 in conjunction with Microsoft's release of the operating system for digital download. The App appears to be very similar to its Windows 8 predecessor with the typical status, photo and check in tabs. The standard chat interface is present as well.

Facebook has included the friend request, inbox and notification icons with touch friendly buttons, and the app now supports Share Charm. Search functionality is also built in, and the app features several Snap Views, but reports suggest some are disabled. At the moment, it appears that the app is not backwards compatible with Windows 8, and users who try to install it from the Windows Store are prompted with a message that says they must upgrade to 8.1 to install the app.

Facebook has began providing television networks with metrics on what TV shows its users are talking about the most. ABC, NBC, FOX, and CBS have all began receiving reports from the social network that clue these companies in on what shows Facebook users like, share, and comment on.

Facebook says that the reports are delivered weekly, and that all user data is anonymized, and the only thing networks see is a final compiled metric such as "total social interactions that occurred." Facebook is hoping that this new initiative will take some of the market share away from Twitter, which is usually the go to for real-time viewer stats during big TV events.

"The conversation is being generated by a group that is much more representative of the general population," Daniel Slotwiner, the head of Facebook's TV metrics team, said in an interview. "That means we should have a better signal as it relates to ratings."

Facebook has been banned in China for what seems like forever, but now Beijing has lifted the ban on the Internet access within the Shanghai free-trade Zone to foreign websites that were previously considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government.

These websites included Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times, but now according to government sources who told the South China Morning Post, the authority in charge of the Hong Kong-like free-trade zone in Shanghai is a first in mainland China. This would also see bids coming in from foreign telecommunications companies for license to provide Internet services within the new zone.

One of the government sources told the South China Morning Post: "In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home. If they can't get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China."

Twitter has increased the feature set of its #music service, adding two music streaming companies to the mix: Spotify and Rdio. These two music streaming services will now offer the ability to view playlists generated by Twitter #music.

Popular songs and songs with the #NowPlaying hashtag will be featured, with users being able to view all 15 of the playlists on the #music page, as well as the apps. This is just another step in the ever-evolving world of Twitter, which is looking to go public in the very near future, and another great step to see more users continue to use Spotify and Rdio.

Celebrities will enjoy Twitter's new feature which is hot off the press, with the social networking giant unleashing two new filters for the Connect tab. Filtered, tries to cut down on spam while Verified only shows interactions with other verified profiles.

You can see the new feature in action in the shot above, with it mainly being implemented for celebrities. Twitter needs to keep celebrities happy, with some celebrities enjoying millions of followers on Twitter.

It appears that Facebook is going to jump into the professional social networking ring and go head-to-head with LinkedIn. A new report is showing off a new section that Facebook is said to be testing called the "Professional Skills" tab. Much like LinkedIn, it would allow users to list out their professional skill sets.

Unlike LinkedIn, however, when clicking on a person's professional skill, it will not take you to a page showing who endorsed you for that skill, but rather to other professionals who claim to possess the same skill. Additionally, the new professional skills tab will only allow you to add skills that have existing Facebook pages. This can be confusing as a quick search shows that skills such as "marketing" have several different pages created by the community.

Facebook has not announced a launch date for this feature, nor has any information on a beta program been released, but we expect some kind of announcement soon. With Facebook adding job-search features and other professional-style searches, users may want to rethink the content they post on the service or at least adjust their privacy settings to only display content they wish the public to see.

Today, the popular professional networking service LinkedIn began suffering from several technical issues. Some users were unable to load their profiles, while other profiles were missing bits and pieces of information. Additionally, other profile issues arose such as missing photos or certain posts not showing up.

As of this writing, some reports are still coming in that their profile is not working as normal, or that it is unreachable altogether. LinkedIn said in a Twitter post that they are aware of the issues and their team is working on fixing the problems now. My profile was down this morning for a few hours and appeared to be down at the time of this writing, but a quick clearing of my browser cache solved the issue and I'm now able to see my full profile again. So if you're experiencing issues, try clearing your browser cache to see if the issues are resolved for you as well.

All Twitter users are being advised today to log into their account and revoke access to all third-party applications after an Islamic hacker managed to pull the entire OAuth database for users of Twitter. Calling himself the Mauritania Attacker, the hacker from the West African country of Mauritania posted details from just over 15,000 Twitter users earlier today and claims to have millions more. It's not clear whether he attacked Twitter or a third-party site. The latter is much more likely. Twitter says they are looking into the situation.

Twitter says that the stolen files do not include passwords, but do contain all of the usernames as well as OAuth access keys used by third-party applications to manage your Twitter account on your behalf. Security expert Allen Woodward, of the University of Surrey in the UK, told website Gigaom that the easy way to protect your account is to log-in and delete all third-party access to the account. Then by simply reauthorizing those accounts, a new key will be generated and everything will be safe again.

"Personally, I do regular housekeeping where I go into the Apps settings of Twitter and delete the third party apps that have access. The reason is that at present Twitter OAuth tokens once issued do not expire. You have to manually revoke them," said Woodwars. "So, I think best thing one could [do] is to go in and revoke third party's apps rights and then just relogin when/if you want to reaccess Twitter via that app. This way a new token will be issued."